Only recently did I start to appreciate the wonder that is an audiobook. I never paid audiobooks much attention because I could never focus on listening to something meaningful while performing another task at the same time. Until I started regularly walking our chocolate lab Fado.

Fado doesn’t really care if I walk along with headphones on, so as long as I don’t get myself killed by a crazy driver while navigating the streets of my neighbourhood, I’m good to go.

Most recent title almost done reading, err, playing, is: Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of BlackBerry.

It’s 11 hours and 29 minutes long, but the book is written and then narrated so well that I have covered 8 hours of it so far and I don’t even know where that time has gone. The book starts off with the history of the two RIM founders, Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie, their high school and college days, and finally early RIM days making wireless modems for the Mobitex network. Then on to first RIM two-way pagers and the crazy idea of putting e-mail on a pager! I loved the part where high level executives at Verizon and AT&T said that no one would want e-mail on a handheld device. Can you believe this? That was in 1998!

I don’t want to spoil one of the cool little facts of the book, but do you know what other fruit was considered before BlackBerry became BlackBerry?

By the way, the name BlackBerry almost lost out to “Blade”, but blade.com turned out to be a hardcore porn site and RIM wisely chose not to go with that name.

The book is divided into two sections, the rise and then the fall of Blackberry. At the 8th hour I am now in part two, listening to some serious trouble in paradise as BlackBerry Storm is a piece of crap and Apple and Android are seriously taking over the market.

I highly recommend it for any technogeek at heart.

Amazon link:
http://www.amazon.com/Losing-Signal-Extraordinary-Spectacular-BlackBerry